Americans Just Want to Eat in Peace — So They Hide It

America: home of the free, land of the brave, an entire country filled to the brim with doughnuts and pizza and nachos and chilaquiles and muffuletta. We love these foods and we love to eat them but, according to a new survey, we’re ashamed to enjoy them.

It’s no surprise that we “let’s put cheese in the crust of the pizza, too” Americans have a contentious, even upsetting, relationship with food and this month’s Vanity Fair/60 Minutes survey revealed just how deep our obsession and shame goes. We love to eat, yes. But oh, are we embarrassed about it. The No. 1 bad habit we’d like to indulge in when no one is looking? Eating fattening food, at 38 percent. And the No. 1 thing we’d like to be able to do without consequences is, again, overeat (44 percent).

It appears from the survey that this scaredy-cat attitude toward indulging in the foods we love has a big impact on our body images, too: 33 percent of women said the thing they would most like to hide is their bodies. (The thing men want to hide most is their credit-card statement.) And when asked whom they judged more, an overwhelming 69 percent of respondents said they judged themselves more than they do other people.